VibePay claims it can help ecommerce retailers get closer to their Gen Z customers through secure ‘social payments’. We spoke to Kieran Bamber, Head of Commercial Partnerships at VibePay, to find out more.  

VibePay is a consumer facing payments app which has built up a highly engaged Generation Z user base. Through open banking, VibePay’s payment APIs provide frictionless checkout payments to help boost conversions, giving instant access to funds and reducing fees for payment processing.

Kieran Bamber (pictured), Head of commercial partnerships at VibePay says a big advantage for partners is that they can gain invaluable transactional insights to help them understand their Gen Z customers.

“This is all done in a GDPR compliant way, using payments to understand today’s Gen Z shopper, and help brands better tailor their products to them, through payments,” says Bamber.

What is the biggest retailer pain point this tech solves?

Gen Z are shopping and spending in a way that’s completely different to what most brands are used to. We can tell our partners where else their customers are spending and how much they are spending – so they can tailor their own offerings. They can stay one step ahead by partnering with Vibe. Our USP is our understanding of our audience. We’re built for Generation Z, by Generation Z, and we know that many brands struggle to target that customer effectively.

What exactly would a retailer get from investing in this solution?

• • Low cost: Our ecosystem uses Open Banking to facilitate frictionless payments between banks without the fees you’d expect from competitors or traditional payment methods.
  • More security: Customers can rely on the security of their own bank when paying through our VibePay API. Meanwhile, bank authentication reduces fraud risk – making the product ideal for financial apps and high value transactions.
  • Seamless subscriptions: We know subscriptions are really popular with Gen Z, but these payments can be costly for businesses to process. Our API allows those payments to move directly from bank-to-bank, cutting out the middlemen, and making payments processing fees cheaper for subscription-based businesses.
  • Closer to the Gen Z consumer. Gen Z trust and identify with the Vibe brand and product suite, which is made to suit their needs and lifestyle. We understand Gen Z like no one else and can tap into our user base to create unique insights on Gen Z for brands.
  • Discovery opportunities: VibePay also creates additional value for sellers through product discovery in the consumer-facing VibePay feed.
  • Bank Agnostic: VibePay supports 95% of UK banks, making it easy to integrate and offer to customers.
  • Increase conversion rates: Through our direct bank-to-bank payments, we remove the need for cards at checkout, removing friction and increasing basket conversation rates.

• What is the average time to generate a return on investment?

  • Our engaged consumer user base have been using the app since it launched in Beta in October, and we already have 20,000 active users, and have moved over £3 m in payments. Due to the nature of our users, they are fast adopters and engage well with new things. Partners could see a return on investment as soon as 1 month after adopting our solution, but it depends entirely on a range of circumstances.
  • We offer a fixed price “all-you-can-eat” structure, with a static cost, which helps businesses better understand the ROI of our offer once in place.
  • We’d be happy to offer more tailored estimates on a case-by-case basis, to help potential partners understand if this is the right solution for them.

What’s been your best client success story?

This is a new product, and we’re currently in conversations with a number of retailers about trialing and investigating the opportunities it offers. We’re quite unique in the sense that, so far, our main client has been our own peer to peer marketplace – VibeTickets.

In fact that’s why we created VibePay. While running VibeTickets we stumbled across problems with payments that we wanted to solve – especially for sellers who needed better settlement and lower fees. We know what it’s like to be on the other side as a vendor, and have designed this with all the knowledge, and frustrations, of the industry built in.

Which kinds of retailers would get most value from this?

The brands and businesses that matter most to our customers. While our users don’t want to know if someone in their network has bought a sandwich in Tesco, they will want to see if they’ve taken a subscription with BirchBox, signed up to PureGym, or sold their trainers through Depop.

It’s ideal for e-Commerce businesses looking to target Gen Z, as well as SMEs in the retail industry looking for a partner that can not only provide payments, but also direct access to GenZ users.

Find out more about VibePay here.